Imagine, it’s 8am on a Tuesday morning. You arrive at work bright eyed and bushy tailed with a cup of iced coffee in hand. The phone rings at 8:01am.
Client: “Hi, uh, I’ve got a question. I’m, uh, I’m not sure how to ask it.”
Me: “Ok, I’m happy to help if I can.”
Client: “So, uh, my friend and I were, uh, doing mushrooms last night. And we were like, petting the dog. My friend got worried thinking we’d poison the dog by touching him. You know, from the sweat on our hands. But, it’s ok right? Or should I bring my dog in?”
This isn’t exactly the 8am question I was prepared for and obviously I’m not allowed to laugh out loud at the client. So let’s talk about mushrooms. Culinary mushrooms are perfectly safe for your pet to eat. Mushrooms are hard to digest raw, and often come out looking exactly like they went in. To feed them to your pet, it’s best to chop them up and cook them. Wild mushrooms and “Magic” mushrooms can be toxic and can be deadly to your pet if ingested. To answer this client’s question, no, you can not poison your dog by taking hallucinogenic mushrooms yourself and then petting the dog. I don’t recommend it, but it will not affect your dog.
What To Do If Your Pet Ingests Magic Mushrooms
If your pet happens to ingest your hallucinogenic mushrooms by mistake, you should take them to your veterinary hospital immediately to induce vomiting. Hallucinogenic mushrooms can cause an increase in vocalization, ataxia, increased heart rate, disorientation, fever, anxiety, tremors, and seizures. Fortunately, life-threatening symptoms have not been reported with hallucinogenic mushrooms. Your pet simply needs to be medically supported to get them safely through their symptoms.
What To Do If Your Pet Ingests Wild Mushrooms
If your pet ingests wild mushrooms that they found outside, some are safe to eat, while others can be toxic and even life threatening to your pet. Wild mushroom ingestion is far more common in dogs, as dogs love to pick up things off the ground. Wild mushrooms are also one of the hardest living things to identify, because many of them are very similar in appearance and can be easily mistaken for another.
Pets that have ingested toxic mushrooms will experience symptoms within a few hours or days. These symptoms include vomiting, diarrhea, cramps, tremors, seizures, organ failure, and even death. If your pet ingests mushrooms outside, it’s best to try and collect a fully intact mushroom for identification and take your pet to your local emergency room. Some mushrooms grow in clumps, so if there are multiple mushrooms in the area at different stages of development, it’s best to gather a couple of samples to aid in identification. The North American Mycological Association is a wonderful resource for mushroom identification and provides a list of volunteers in each state that can be contacted to help identify mushrooms.
Stay tuned, next week we will explore the beneficial mushrooms and when to start feeding them to your pets.